The Écomusée du fier monde is an history museum that promotes
grassroots involvement. You are invited to explore little unknown aspects of
Montréal culture. As part of the “Nourrir le quartier, nourir la ville”
exhibition, the Museum wanted to propose two interactive map kiosks to explore
the evolution of the Bell Center area from 1947 to these days. The Museum asked
to Montreal history researchers of the
Laboratoire d’histoire et de patrimoine de Montréal de l’UQAM (LHPM)
and Mapgears to build a mapping application that can help visitors
to visualize and understand food industry evolution over the years.

The data integration and configuration of the look and feel of the application
were realized by the technical team of the LHPM using the
SCHEMA system (Système de Cartographie de l’HistoirE de MontréAl). This
Historial Geospatial Platform is available for Students and researchers of the
Department of History to help them in their work. This infrastructure
built on the top of the eVouala platform was funded by the Montréal Research
Partnership: “Montréal, plaque tournante des échanges”.

Design

The design of the GIS databases and the photographic archives was entirely
realized and supervised by the GIS team of the “Laboratoire d’histoire et de
patrimoine de Montréal de l’UQAM (LHPM)”][lhpm] using the eVouala Platform
and QGIS. User can queried information on the map and can select between
four specific different years representative of the evolution of the study area.
The composition of [mosaic] used in historical maps was also realized by the
LHPM using open source tools GDAL / OGR and Gimp (to adjust the
color pallet curve) before integration into the eVouala Platform.

Innovation

The innovation proposed by the Mapgears development team is to
enhance the export process of an eVouala interactive mapping application.
The purpose of this new feature is to build a fully standalone offline web
application, running locally on a Windows operating system. For this project,
we’ve selected an all-in-one touchscreen Windows PC type configured to run the
application running while entirely disconnected from the Internet in a Chrome browser.
Our tests have demonstrated that Windows was the must stable operating system
and the best choice for minimizing maintenance tasks.

Many steps are required to achieve this. In addition to the custom CSS stylesheets
created by the LHPM technical team, geographic data and raster
imagery (image mosaics of historical maps) must be exported in a format that
can be used directly by a browser installed on a computer. All base map layers
are tiled with Mapserver and Mapcache on the eVouala Platform and
interactive vector data is rendered using Openlayers. The
entire export process is automated using the built-in export application feature.

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